England under the Normans and Angevins, 1066-1272

IN England, as in France and Germany, the main
characteristic of the last twenty years, from the
point of view of the student of history, has been that
new material has been accumulating much faster than
it can be assimilated or absorbed. The standard histories of the last generation need to be revised, or even
to be put aside as obsolete, in the light of the new
information that is coming in so rapidly and in such
vast bulk. But the students and researchers of to-day
have shown little enthusiasm as yet for the task of rewriting history on a large scale. We see issuing from
the press hundreds of monographs, biographies, editions
of old texts, selections from correspondence, or collections
of statistics, mediæval and modern. But the writers
who (like the late Bishop Stubbs or Professor Samuel
Gardiner) undertake to tell over again the history of
a long period, with the aid of all the newly discovered
material, are few indeed. It is comparatively easy to
write a monograph on the life of an individual or a
short episode of history. But the modern student,
knowing well the mass of material that he has to collate,
and dreading lest he may make a slip through over-

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